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Consultant and business angel, Vincent Rosso decided to invest in BlaBlaCar and in 2009 became co-founder of the Spanish arm of a transport network with over twenty million registered users and two million travelers a month in Europe. It aimed to revolutionize the way people travel with a simple idea: putting drivers with space in their vehicles in touch with passengers without their own transport.

A qualified engineer, Vincent Rosso is a specialist in digital marketing, disruptive business models, the sharing economy and entrepreneurial initiative in the start-up environment. He advocates collaborative consumption as a formula for complementing rather than susbtituting traditional avenues. This involves horizontal business models that have emerged among communities, which seek to transform how people live, think and create.

He is well-acquainted with the BlaBlaCar case. From 2009 to 2015 he was the company’s general manager for Spain and had to deal with the traditional transport sectors’ protests alleging unfair competition. The controversy was settled by a report from the Ministry of Public Works and Transport, according to which carrying passengers and sharing costs was not against the law, a stance that Rosso had maintained throughout the wrangling. From July 2014 to December 2015 he also took on the management of the company in Portugal.

Before heading up the development of the network in Spain, Vincent Rosso already had extensive professional experience. He started out as a telecommunications engineer at Dassault Data Services (1996-1999), but swiftly moved on to the consultancy field, at Telenium and Adecco, and worked in the IT sector with Interwoven and Kabira Technology.

He graduated at the École spéciale de Mécanique et d’Electricité in Paris and took a master’s in Industrial and Systems Engineering at the San José State University in California.